SkullThe Web Is Dead? A DebateHow the Web WinsHow Do Native Apps and Web Apps Compare?

Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, assimpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searchingand more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this newparadigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And MichaelWolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Webfor more promising (and profitable) pastures.

Who's to Blame:UsAs much as we love the open, unfettered Web, we're abandoning it forsimpler, sleeker services that just work.by Chris Anderson

You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that's oneapp. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New YorkTimes — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to apodcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll throughRSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps.At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening toPandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix'sstreaming service.

You've spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you arenot alone.

This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of themost important shifts in the digital world has been the move from thewide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet fortransport but not the browser for display. It's driven primarily bythe rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it's a worldGoogle can't crawl, one where HTML doesn't rule. And it's the worldthat consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they'rerejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platformsoften just work better or fit better into their lives (the screencomes to them, they don't have to go to the screen). The fact thatit's easier for companies to make money on these platforms onlycements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not theculmination of the digital revolution.

A decade ago, the ascent of the Web browser as the center of thecomputing world appeared inevitable. It seemed just a matter of timebefore the Web replaced PC application software and reduced operatingsystems to a "poorly debugged set of device drivers," as Netscapecofounder Marc Andreessen famously said. First Java, then Flash, thenAjax, then HTML5 — increasingly interactive online code — promised toput all apps in the cloud and replace the desktop with the webtop.Open, free, and out of control.

But there has always been an alternative path, one that saw the Web asa worthy tool but not the whole toolkit. In 1997, Wired published anow-infamous "Push!" cover story, which suggested that it was time to"kiss your browser goodbye." The argument then was that "push"technologies such as PointCast and Microsoft's Active Desktop wouldcreate a "radical future of media beyond the Web."

"Sure, we'll always have Web pages. We still have postcards andtelegrams, don't we? But the center of interactive media —increasingly, the center of gravity of all media — is moving to a post-HTML environment," we promised nearly a decade and half ago. Theexamples of the time were a bit silly — a "3-D furry-muckers VR space"and "headlines sent to a pager" — but the point was altogetherprescient: a glimpse of the machine-to-machine future that would beless about browsing and more about getting.

Who's to Blame:ThemChaos isn't a business model. A new breed of media moguls is bringingorder — and profits — to the digital world.by Michael Wolff

An amusing development in the past year or so — if you regard post-Soviet finance as amusing — is that Russian investor Yuri Milner has,bit by bit, amassed one of the most valuable stakes on the Internet:He's got 10 percent of Facebook. He's done this by undercuttingtraditional American VCs — the Kleiners and the Sequoias who would, indays past, insist on a special status in return for their earlyinvestment. Milner not only offers better terms than VC firms, he seesthe world differently. The traditional VC has a portfolio of Websites, expecting a few of them to be successes — a good metaphor forthe Web itself, broad not deep, dependent on the connections betweensites rather than any one, autonomous property. In an entirelydifferent strategic model, the Russian is concentrating his bet on aunique power bloc. Not only is Facebook more than just another Website, Milner says, but with 500 million users it's "the largest Website there has ever been, so large that it is not a Web site at all."

According to Compete, a Web analytics company, the top 10 Web sitesaccounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006,and about 75 percent in 2010. "Big sucks the traffic out of small,"Milner says. "In theory you can have a few very successful individualscontrolling hundreds of millions of people. You can become big fast,and that favors the domination of strong people."

Milner sounds more like a traditional media mogul than a Webentrepreneur. But that's exactly the point. If we're moving away fromthe open Web, it's at least in part because of the rising dominance ofbusinesspeople more inclined to think in the all-or-nothing terms oftraditional media than in the come-one-come-all collectivistutopianism of the Web. This is not just natural maturation but in manyways the result of a competing idea — one that rejects the Web'sethic, technology, and business models. The control the Web took fromthe vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a littlerethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back.

This development — a familiar historical march, both feudal andcorporate, in which the less powerful are sapped of their reason forbeing by the better resourced, organized, and efficient — is perhapsthe rudest shock possible to the leveled, porous, low-barrier-to-entryethos of the Internet Age. After all, this is a battle that seemedfought and won — not just toppling newspapers and music labels butalso AOL and Prodigy and anyone who built a business on the idea thata curated experience would beat out the flexibility and freedom of theWeb.